Thursday, 29 April 2010

RAMALLAH, Apr 29, 2010 (IPS) - A convoy of boats laden with humanitarian goods and accompanied by hundreds of journalists, human rights activists and European parliamentarians, is due to challenge Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza at the end of May.

The Free Gaza movement’s ‘Freedom Flotilla’ will see three cargo ships and five passenger boats with about 600 people aboard attempting to deliver hundreds of tonnes of emergency aid to Gaza’s besieged civilian population of 1.5 million people.

The move will also attempt to focus international attention on Israel’s crippling blockade of Gaza and its collective punishment of the coastal territory.

However, while Israel will rightly bear the brunt of the negative publicity, the Jewish state’s siege would not have succeeded without international, regional and even some Palestinian support.

The collusion of fellow Muslim and Arab country Egypt, and the tacit approval of other regional regimes, is a particularly strong rallying point for the collective anger of the Arab street.

"Without the coordinated efforts of regional and international players in supporting Israel in its siege of Gaza it would have failed by now," Ahmed Yousef, Hamas’ deputy foreign minister, told IPS.

Over a million Gazans have been reduced to living in a state of chronic poverty, unemployment, malnutrition and misery in one of the world’s most densely populated areas.

Gaza, 45 km long by 5-12 km wide, has been described as the world’s largest open-air prison.

During Israel’s military assault on the territory, codenamed Operation Cast Lead, from December 2008 to January 2009, civilians had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide in the hermetically sealed territory as the Israeli Air Force carried out extensive and indiscriminate sorties over residential areas.

Although Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, it continues to control the coastal territory’s borders, airspace, coastline, population registry, taxes, large buffer zones along the border, and most of its imports and exports and electricity and water supplies.

Cairo controls the Rafah entry to Egypt in the south of the Gaza Strip. This is predominantly a passenger terminal although some passage of goods has been permitted.

However, all other crossing points into the strip are controlled by the Israelis. These terminals are specifically designed for the passage of goods and produce into Gaza.

In 2005 an agreement between Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority (PA) was signed.

The agreement outlined how European Union monitors and PA officials and security - all linked to Israeli surveillance equipment and cameras - would control Gaza’s side of the Rafah border crossing.

In January 2006 when Hamas won free and democratic elections, Israel started tightening its stranglehold on the coastal territory.

Following Hamas’ military coup in June 2007 Israel imposed a full blockade with the cooperation of the Egyptian authorities.

Even though Hamas now controls Gaza, before Gazans can leave the territory their movement has to be coordinated with the Egyptian authorities who in turn coordinate with the PA and the Israelis as to who may or may not leave.

While Egypt has permitted the entry of limited amounts of humanitarian goods it has forcibly prevented larger convoys as well as activists accompanying the convoys from entering Gaza.

Egypt has been blowing up many of the hundreds of smuggling tunnels that link Gaza with the Sinai and through which most of the necessary day-to-day goods, as well as arms, are smuggled.

The Egyptians recently commenced construction of an underground, bomb-proof 14 km-long steel wall complete with advanced American surveillance technology to prevent further smuggling tunnels from being built.

Samir Awad, from Birzeit University near Ramallah, argues that the Egyptians, as recipients of one of the largest amounts of American foreign aid, are under enormous pressure from the U.S. to cooperate with the blockade.

"If Egypt doesn’t kowtow to Washington’s regional foreign policy they could lose their aid," says Awad. "But the Egyptian authorities are also interested in keeping the region politically stable until President Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal can take over as his successor.

"They believe pressuring Hamas to sign a reconciliation agreement, which they authored, with the PA is essential to stabilising the area," Awad told IPS.

The Egyptians are afraid that a successful Islamic regime such as Hamas on their doorstep would provide succour to their own Muslim Brotherhood which poses a serious political threat to the regime of President Mubarak.

Being popular with their people has never been an issue with the Middle East’s dictatorial regimes where democracy and human rights are not priorities. They lost the popularity battle a long time ago.

Instead, they count on continued economic and military aid from the West, particularly the U.S., and political support from their elites who benefit from the mutual cronyism.

By controlling the media the Egyptian authorities have succeeded, to a certain degree, in persuading their public that the fault for the Gaza siege lies with Hamas and Israel exclusively.

Prof. Moshe Ma’oz from Jerusalem’s Hebrew University believes American coercion is less of an issue.

"The Egyptians have their own agenda and what they are doing is coordinating their common interests with that of the Israelis," Ma’oz told IPS.

Yousef, meanwhile, believes the PA is also complicit.

"The PA might say publicly that it is against the collective suffering of Gaza’s civilians under the siege, but actually it is benefiting politically from the blockade as it hopes this will undermine our rule in their favour," he told IPS.

Critics might further argue that Hamas bears some responsibility for the situation by not being more flexible in reaching an agreement with the PA as well as being unwilling to negotiate with Israel.

"Either way, there will be no progress on the lifting of the siege on Gaza until the Palestinian factions get their act together and overcome their differences. That is the essential first step," Ma’oz told IPS.

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=51248

Hamas: Egypt kills Gazans with gas

A senior Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri has held Egypt responsible for the death of four Palestinians killed in a border tunnel and has demanded for an impartial investigation.

Speaking at a press conference in Gaza on Thursday, Abu Zuhri strongly condemned Cairo's application of gas against Palestinian citizens. The Hamas official also demanded Egypt to conduct an immediate probe into the incident and to prosecute the perpetrators, the International Middle East Media Center reported.

"This is not the first time Egypt launches poison gas attacks against tunnel workers. At least 40 tunnel workers have been poisoned by toxic gasses since the siege on Gaza began. A total of 145 have lost their lives in various events," Abu Zuhri pointed out.

The Hamas spokesperson noted that the tunnels are being used by the Palestinians to bring essential goods such as food and medicine into the besieged Gaza Strip. He added that all border crossings must open and that Cairo should not pump gas into cross-border tunnels.

Palestinian medical sources in the Gaza Strip reported on Wednesday evening that four Palestinians were killed and nine others were wounded after the Egyptian security forces pumped gas into a border tunnel.

Israel has closed all border crossings to the Gaza Strip for more than two years. The illegal Israeli imposed blockade on the Gaza Strip, which has steadily tightened since 2007, has had a disastrous impact on the humanitarian and economic situation in the coastal enclave.

In Gaza Strip some 1.5 million people are denied their basic rights, including freedom of movement, and the right to safe, secure and healthy living conditions. Poverty and unemployment rates now stand at approximately 80% and 60% respectively in the costal enclave.

No comments:

Jewish eugenics pre-dates Hitler's Master Race According to the Israeli daily newspaper quoted below, before the Nazi Third Reich in Germany plotted to create a Master Race from the European gene pool, Zionists had already established a racial purification program to create the perfect Jewish bloodline. More

From the horse's mouth:

"Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves." -- Menachem Begin (Israeli Prime Minister, 1977-1983. Nobel Prize Winner for...Peace!)

At the dawn of civilization, the blood rite, in which human blood is drunk from the body of a still-living victim, was known to many tribes. However, only one people, that has never progressed beyond the Stone Age, has continued to practice the blood rite and ritual murder. This people are known to the world as Jews.

The author of this book is not Christian, Muslim or Hindu but a Jew and is the son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, and a professor of Jewish Renaissance and Medieval History at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, just outside Tel Aviv.

The following translation was performed free of charge to protest an injustice: the destruction by the ADL of Ariel Toaff’s BLOOD PASSOVER on Jewish ritual murder.

.

.

They cut this Palestinian kid's arms for "throwing Stones" before murdering him

Repeat: The author is the son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, and a professor of Jewish Renaissance and Medieval History at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, just outside Tel Aviv.

Dr. Toaff is uniquely qualified to write this book, being thoroughly familiar with the derivative literature in English, French, German and Italian, as well as the original documentary sources in Latin, Medieval Italian, Hebrew and Yiddish. This is not something he worked on in secret. On the contrary, he worked on it openly with his university students and colleagues in Israel for several years; one of his students was even going to publish a paper on the subject. The author is extremely careful about what he says, and his conclusions must be taken seriously. It reads like a detective story.

If it had been published in Israel, in Hebrew, no one would have cared. There are large bodies of literature in Hebrew that Jews do not wish Gentiles to know about. But Dr. Toaff’s announcement of its publication in Italy, in Italian, raised a worldwide firestorm of fury. Under unbearable pressure, the book was withdrawn from publication, and is not to be re-issued.

You can strike a blow against censorship by circulating this text by e-mail or posting in on the Internet. No one can sue hundreds of people.

If the text is all over the Internet, and everybody has it and everybody knows what is in it, the cat will be out of the bag, and it will have to be published – sooner or later.

"When I open the police files I find detailed reports about Jewish criminals. The archives have enough
material for 100 historians and for 100 years, and even then they won't finish." -- Haartez News. Jerusalem, Tuesday, November 2,2004

1 - Since being branded an "anti-Semite" has become quite a stigma, placing in jeopardy the individual's economic and social welfare, should not the phrase be exactly and rationally defined? Inevitably someone is going to be mislabeled sometime. And yet the arch-Zionist Anti-Defamation League of Banai B'rith, which usually has charge of wielding the branding iron, has repeatedly refused to answer queries from this committee asking for such a definition. We have sadly concluded by wondering whether that "upright" organization should not more accurately be called the Anti-Definition League!

aula

aula

2 - What is a "Semite"? Is it or is it not a member of a racial group? According to the prevailing Jewish authority, Jewry is a religious group only, with no racial (i.e., genetic) identity. Yet they continue tacitly to endorse a 19th century racialist conception of themselves every time they label an opponent "anti-Semitic." In order to get United Nations approval of a measure condemning religious discrimination recently, the so-called State of Israel gravely assented to having the word "anti-Jewish" substituted for "anti-Semitic." If the two are synonymous to any extent, would it not be more accurate if all Jewish organizations similarly dropped the meaningless and racist designation "anti-Semitic" in favor of "anti-Jewish"?

aula

aula

3 - As we have seen, the majority of today's Jews are not descendants of the Old Testament Hebrews but of a Mongolian people of Central Asia called Khazars. These people were fairly recent converts to Judaism, as Arthur Koestler and earlier writers have shown. Yet, the non-Semitic Mongolian "Jews" are by far the most powerful in Jewish and Zionist affairs, and are the ones who quickest raise the cry of "anti-Semitism" against ideas or activities that irritate them. In the interest of historical accuracy, should not this peculiar but evidently necessary vocabulary of swear-words be enriched by the term "anti-Khazar"? At the very least, should not intelligent people realize that anti-Zionism does not equal "anti-Semitism"?

The Six Million Reconsidered, Committee for Truth in History, Historical Review Press

"The Jewish people as a whole will become its own Messiah. It will attain world dominion by the dissolution of other races, by the abolition of frontiers, the annihilation of monarchy and by the establishment of a world republic in which the Jews will everywhere exercise the privilege of citizenship. In this New World Order the "children of Israel" will furnish all the leaders without encountering opposition. The Governments of the different peoples forming the world republic will fall without difficulty into the hands of the Jews. It will then be possible for the Jewish rulers to abolish private property and everywhere to make use of the resources of the state. Thus will the promise of the Talmud be fulfilled, in which is said that when the Messianic time is come, the Jews will have all the property of the whole world in their hands."